Tunnel Vision; With Station's Reopening, Even Commuters Smile

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: September 17, 2002

Sometimes it seems as if the subway is not manmade, but has been around forever, like a rock formation or a river, and so it should abide by certain steadfast natural laws. Such as:

The 1 and the 9 trains should go together, like Fred and Ginger, like bacon and eggs, and neither should ever go to Brooklyn. They should go to the South Ferry terminal, which should be too small and too curved. And when the trains arrive, they should always make a sound like a tsunami sweeping through a sheet-metal factory.

Yesterday morning, at least in the subway, it felt as if the world had been righted again.

It was a Monday at 9 o'clock. The Staten Island Ferry emptied its waves of weary-looking workers into the South Ferry terminal. They crowded, jostled and jammed their fingers into their ears as the scream of the trains returned to the tip of Manhattan.

And through it all, almost to a person, they smiled gratefully, like people reunited with long-lost friends.

''I never thought I'd say it,'' said Justin Hoyt, standing in front of the token booth as the din of wheel and rail drowned him out, ''but I'm very happy to hear that sound again.

''It's an old, old sound.''

For many New Yorkers, the ceremonies that marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack provided a moment to try to reconcile themselves to what had happened, to move ahead.

But in a city that has never been good at introspection, others looked in more mundane places for reassurance.

They looked for their old routine, more precious to them than they had ever realized, and on the brand-new subway maps yesterday, many found it once again.

Little more than a year after an entire subway tunnel was crushed and the system shut down for the first time in decades, the map now looks almost as it did before Sept. 11.

The Cortlandt Street Station on the N and R line is reopened, full once again of the oddly comforting red-and-white shopping bags lugged down from the Century 21 department store across the street. The 2 and 3 trains are back on the express tracks in Manhattan.

And the 1 and 9 are running, unbelievably, almost through the middle of ground zero to South Ferry again, through 1,400 feet of new subway tunnel built in six months -- ahead of schedule and under budget, the first ribbon of rebirth amid the swept desolation of the World Trade Center site.

Walking into the South Ferry Station yesterday morning, two women applauded before they swiped their MetroCards. A Staten Island man had his video camera to record the moment.

Another, wearing a black ''Got Beer?'' T-shirt, said fiercely that he was proud to be a New Yorker.

Meanwhile, Samkutty Samuel, a station supervisor, stood in front of the station waving at people and announcing over and over through a bullhorn:

''Welcome back to South Ferry! Everybody smiling! Everybody happy!''

They were, and the two men who seemed the happiest were not even commuters.

They were wearing hard hats and official-looking reflective vests and expressions of great professional pride.

One was Mysore L. Nagaraja, the chief engineer for New York City Transit and the man in charge of the tunnel reconstruction.

The other was Jan Szumanski, the general superintendent of the project for Pegno/Tully, a contracting partnership that rebuilt the tunnel.

Mr. Szumanski said that shortly after the tunnel was completed on Sept. 1 and the first diesel train successfully ran through to test it, he and his workers held a celebratory barbecue virtually atop the tunnel, toasting it with beer bottles.

''I think that once in your life, if you are lucky,'' he said, ''you get to be part of something very special, and this was it for us.''

He added, his voice beginning to crack:

''For me, this is my repayment to America, for taking me 20 years ago from Poland, a nobody. That's how I think of it.''

In fact, Mr. Szumanski, who has hypertension, put so much pressure on himself to finish the job early and well that he suffered an attack in the spring and was briefly hospitalized.

''I fell down, and so they took me to the hospital,'' he said yesterday, shrugging. ''It was no big deal.''

But he concedes that he has planned a long vacation in November in Cancun, where he feels that his chances of running into subway officials will be low.

Behind them, the exodus from the ferry into the reborn subway continued, and practically the only way to tell that this Monday morning was different from almost any before the attack was that everyone seemed almost disturbingly pleased to be on his or her way to work.

Angela Brown, a transit worker who helped cut the ribbon when the station reopened on Sunday, reassured a visitor that this, too, would return to normal and make us all feel much better.

The terrorists, in other words, could not stop our subway, and they certainly cannot take away our right to look unhappy when we ride it.

''I give it a week,'' Ms. Brown said.

Photos: With the reopening of the South Ferry Station, the 1 and 9 trains are again running almost through the middle of ground zero. Rosa Robinson, left, a station supervisor, handed out new subway maps at the station yesterday. (Photographs by Matt Moyer for The New York Times)